The Waste Land not figuring very largely in Mam’s scheme of things. “The thing is,” I said finally, “he won the Nobel Prize.” “Well,” she said, with that unerring grasp of inessentials which is the prerogative of mothers, “I’m not surprised. It was a beautiful overcoat.”
ALAN BENNETTOne recipe for happiness is to have to sense of entitlement.’ To this she added a star and noted at the bottom of the page: ‘This is not a lesson I have ever been in a position to learn.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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If I am doing nothing, I like to be doing nothing to some purpose. That is what leisure means.
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Books generally just confirm you in what you have, perhaps unwittingly, decided to do already.
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But the headmaster happened to have been to Cambridge and decided to try and push some of us towards Oxford and Cambridge.
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You must take people as they come. Remember, too that though you will generally know more about the condition than the patient, it is the patient who has the condition and this if nothing else bestows on him or her a kind of wisdom.
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The days weren’t long enough for the reading she wanted to do.
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But most men regard their life as a poem that women threaten.
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I’m all in favour of free expression provided it’s kept rigidly under control.
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So boring you fall asleep halfway through her name.
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They may not have two spondees to rub together but they still want to pen their saga untrammelled by life-threatening activities like trailing round Sainsbury’s, emptying the dishwasher or going to the nativity play.
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To read is to withdraw.To make oneself unavailable. One would feel easier about it if the pursuit inself were less…selfish.
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One of the hardest things for boys to learn is that a teacher is human.
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I dont know whether you’ve ever looked into a miner’s eyes for any length of time, that is. Because it is the loveliest blue you’ve ever seen.
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I wish they were like the White Rhinosix of them left in the Serengeti National Park, and all males.
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We still don’t like to admit the war was even partly our fault because so many of our people died.
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But then, when I did go, the contrast between Leeds, which was very black and sooty in those days, and Cambridge, which seemed like something out of a fairystory, in the grip of a hard frost, was just wonderful.
ALAN BENNETT